Saturday, 30 March 2013

It’s always the way isn’t it, very few cartographic related anniversaries in February and then too many in March. This month sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Dr John Snow and for anyone who has attended a Better Mapping seminar, the first map will be very familiar to you as it is used by Giles Darkes as part of his talk illustrating how you can present statistical data using maps.

Although he is better known as one of the founding fathers of modern epidemiology, Dr. John Snow produced this map of the area around the Broad Street pump to illustrate his hypothesis that cholera reproduced in the human body and was spread through contaminated water. This contradicted the prevailing theory that diseases were spread by "miasma" in the air. The September 1854 cholera outbreak was centred in the Soho district, close to Snow's house. Snow mapped the 13 public wells and all the known cholera deaths around Soho, and noted the spatial clustering of cases around one particular water pump. He examined water samples from various wells under a microscope, and confirmed the presence of an unknown bacterium in the Broad Street samples. Despite strong scepticism from the local authorities, he had the pump handle removed from the Broad Street pump and the outbreak quickly subsided. Snow subsequently published a map of the epidemic to support his theory.

In his talk Giles cleverly shows how the results can be ‘manipulated’ depending on how you categorise the data. If the area around the pump is partitioned in different ways, it can seriously skew the data and even suggest that the Broad Street pump is not necessarily the problem. A cautionary tale that is still valid today in reminding us that the aggregation and categorisation of data for portrayal graphically is vitally important to the message that we are trying to convey cartographically. Indeed, some anomalies are worth noting. Although the large workhouse just north of Broad Street housed over 500 paupers, it suffered very few cholera deaths because it had its own well (not shown on the map). The workers at the brewery one block east of the Broad Street pump could drink all the beer they wanted; the fermentation killed the cholera bacteria, and none of the brewery workers contracted cholera. Many of the deaths further away from the Broad Street pump were people who worked at the market on Broad Street and drank from that well.

Our second anniversary this month is the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Cobbett, best known for his book Cobbett’s Rides, a topographical narrative of his travels around the south east of England still available in Penguin Classics form. The map I have chosen to illustrate this was published in A Geographical Dictionary of England and Wales, by Cobbett in 1832. The map shows an outline of Hampshire, in an almost unrecognisable shape - either a very strange projection or a bad map! The only features are the main towns.

Cobbett was born in Farnham, Surrey, and his grave can still be seen in the parish churchyard. At various times he was a sergeant-major in the British Army, a campaigning journalist, a political prisoner, an exile in America, the editor of journals, and the Radical MP for Oldham. In the 1820s he returned from political exile in America and undertook a series of rides through the countryside as the basis for a series of articles for publication in his own journal The Political Register. In 1830, he made a selection of the rides and published them in book form. http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/hantsmap/hantsmap/cobbett/cobbett1.htm

Coming far more up to date for our third anniversary, this one actually happened 50 years ago when on 27 March 1963 the Chairman of British Railways Dr Richard Beeching issued a report calling for huge cuts to the UK's rail network.The map shows just how extensive our rail network used to be and even this one doesn’t show all the smaller branch lines that criss-crossed the country at the time. The initial report proposed the closure of over 6000 miles of railway and over 2300 stations. Some were reprieved, but over 1900 stations did close and the many ‘dismantled railway’ annotations that appear on OS maps bears testimony to just how many miles of track were decommissioned, with lots of the former lines now forming part of our long distance footpath or national cycle network routes.As one commentator noted, the name ‘Beeching’ quite often evokes a response normally associated with mass murderers and the report was deeply unpopular at the time. The Beeching closures failed in their attempt to eliminate BR's losses, achieving a saving of just £30 million, whilst overall losses were running in excess of £100 million per year. Beeching himself was unrepentant about his role in the closures: "I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping."
﻿

What do the following have in common?

Maps as music

Edwardian transport planning

Smells of Paris

Pacman

The map of 1000 cuts

Maps in the media

Word maps

They all featured in the Design Group’s excellent one-day workshop entitled ‘How maps inspire us’ at the Steer Davies Gleave offices on 14th March. It really was a fascinating day that took aspects of cartography that we are familiar with but looked at them from a totally different viewpoint. We were treated to some very engaging talks from a range of speakers and it was noticeable that similar themes kept being picked out. The underlying theme was the sense of place and how we move from being in a ‘space’ to being in a ‘place’ by the things that we associate with it through a variety of senses.. We considered the associative elements of senses and what reminds us most of particular locations – think how often a smell can make you remember a particular place.

Looking ahead:

If you haven’t yet booked for the talk by Michael Palin at the RGS on 12th April it’s not too late to do so. Entitled ‘A life in Maps’, it promises to be a fascinating evening from one of our ‘National Treasures’. Book your ticket now

BCS will have a panel on the IMIA stand at the London Book Fair from 15th-17th April, so if you are attending, please make sure that you come and visit us to see the pre-publication details of the BCS 50th anniversary book. Due for publication later this year the book celebrates 50 years of the Society by selecting a UK event and world event from each year and illustrating it with an appropriate map. Pre-publication price will be £12.50, so keep an eye on the website in the near future for details.

Wednesday, 6 March 2013

A
quiet month for BCS activities as February often is. It feels like you’re
coming out of winter, but it’s not really spring yet, it’s an in between time
that can be bracingly nice or very damp and grey. No prizes for correctly
identifying which we are enjoying at the moment. We have run two Restless Earthworkshops, one in Chipping Norton and one in Hackney and their popularity is as
high as ever. We have another 3 confirmed for this academic year and several
possible venues still to be confirmed.

Coming
up in March, we have the Design Group Special Interest Group event on 14th
March at the Steer Davies Gleave offices in London. The title is ‘How Maps
Inspire Us’ and the SIG have lined up some excellent speakers from disciplines
outside traditional cartography who will present on why they find maps
inspirational.

Planning
for the Annual Symposium in September is well advanced and the draft programme
should be out soon. We have papers from a wide range of contributors, including
the Heads of the major UK Mapping Agencies. This Symposium will also include
the biennial Helen Wallis Memorial Lecture, this year being delivered by Nick
Millea of the Bodleian Library.

Two
months into the 50th anniversary and I’ve hit the buffers, metaphorically. A
quiet month for anniversaries, I’ve had to opt for something that actually had
its centenary last year, with a rather disquieting footnote in 2013. It was on
10th February 1913, that the body of Robert Falcon Scott was found, along with
Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers, by the relief party sent to search for Scott’s
ill fated expedition. The centenary was commemorated with a special map
produced by Cheri Hunston MAartist, author and illustrator based in South Devon as part of
the International Scott Centenary Expedition.
Copies can still be purchased via her website. Cheri kindly gave permission for
the image of the map to feature in this Bulletin. There is also a blog thatCheri set up which details all the research and the day to day development of
the map.

Staying
with the theme of icy wastes, the winter of 1963 was a particularly cold one in
the UK, especially in January and February. This was in the days before
undersoil heating for football pitches and the FA Cup was particularly badly
hit by the weather. The fifth round was originally scheduled for Saturday 16th February, but the delays
to the matches in the third and fourth rounds prevented the fifth round ties
from being played until much later.

The
freezing conditions hit the country just before Christmas 1962 and for the next
three months the list of postponements indicate just how bad things were. Only
three FA Cup third round ties were played on the scheduled date of January 5th,
with the last tie in that round being played on March 11th. The Lincoln v
Coventry tie was postponed 15 times and fourteen of the other ties suffered ten
or more postponements.

This happened in January, but a bit too
late to make my last bulletin. The latest in a series of what the original
article referred to as a “super-duper-epic-digital-mapping fail”. The USS
Guardian ran aground on a reef in the Philippine Sea. The Tubbataha Reef is
an environmentally sensitive natural park, and the Guardian was
navigating through the area without the necessary clearance. When Philippine
officials informed the Guardian that it had entered a restricted area, and
would have to be boarded and inspected, the ship replied: “Take it to the U.S.
Embassy.” And then it hit the reef and got stuck! No one was injured and no
fuel oil leaked, but the damage to the reef may be extensive and the Navy has
decided to scrap the $277 million ship, cutting it into three parts to remove
it from the reef without further damage.

So what's this got to do with cartography?

A few days after the incident, the Navy revealed that the digital maps the
Guardian used to navigate misplaced the reef by about eight nautical miles. The
Navy has since advised other ships to compare electronic charts to paper ones
before following directions. The full article can be found at the link ReadWrite Article.

A rare double, as 2013 is the 540th
anniversary of the birth and the 470th anniversary of the death of
Nicolaus Copernicus. He was the first to conclusively prove that the Earth was
not the fixed centre of the universe, nor did the sun and the stars move around
us as Ptolemy had argued more than a millennium earlier.

And finally, what the BBC referred to as “One of the most
important space launches of the year” took place on 11th
February. Landsat-8 was launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base. The satellite
being deployed by this mission will maintain the longest continuous image
record of the Earth's surface as viewed from space. Landsat-1 was launched in
1972 and whilst we may now be getting used to seeing high resolution satellite
imagery, the 15m to 100m wavelength of the Landsat missions provides an
invaluable tool for a wide variety of research activities including monitoring
the health of crops, the status of volcanoes, measuring the growth of cities
and the extent of glaciers. If you think you don’t really access much Landsat
imagery think again, as one of its best known uses is on Google Earth and
Google Maps as background information.

Very
Best Wishes for a Happy New Year as we embark on 12 months of celebration for
the 50th Anniversary of The
British Cartographic Society. The Programme Committee have put together an
excellent variety of events to celebrate our 50th year and I do hope
that you will be able to make it to at least one of our events this year to
help us celebrate the occasion with as many members as possible. We are already
advertising our ‘Evening with Michael Palin’ on the website. He will be talking
to us on 12th April at the RGS in London, so get online and book your tickets as it is bound to be a popular event.

On the subject of our 50th Anniversary, I
thought it might be interesting to do a monthly check on who else is
celebrating this month. The Metropolitan Underground Railway opened in 1863, so
beats us by 100 years. The first services couldn’t have been very comfortable
experiences with the soot and smoke, but having said that travelling on the
underground last week during the rush hour wasn’t exactly fun. The delineation
on the left is the first line, reproduced faithfully and is definitely
pre-Beck. Those of you who attended the Annual UKGeoforum lecture will have
heard Mark Ovenden’s excellent talk on underground maps, a topic which has
certainly been to the fore recently. Mark is a prolific author and his latest
book “London Underground by Design”, was published recently and is a ‘must’ for
those interested in cartographic design.

The Flying Scotsman’s last scheduled run took place in
1963. As the map illustrates, it operated on the East Coast Route and could do
the run from London to Edinburgh in just under 7 and a half hours, compared to
today’s quickest time of 4 hours 19 minutes. With all the current debate on the
HS2 link, the desire to get everywhere as quickly as possible seems to occupy
the mind as much as ever. A lot of maps have appeared in the media this week,
with a good proportion of the coverage speculating on the ‘kink’ in the line in
Cheshire, with the more scurrilous suggesting that the change in alignment has
something to do with not wishing to affect a certain part of the Chancellor’s
constituency.

There
has also been a lot of speculation in the press about whether there will be a
referendum on our relationship with Europe and whether it will be a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’
question. Well, back in 1963, President de Gaulle said “Non” to Britain’s
membership of the European Economic Union. Enlargement has been a principal feature of the
Union's political landscape. The EU's predecessors were founded by the "Inner
Six", those countries willing to forge ahead with the Community whilst
others remained sceptical. The French President feared British membership and
vetoed its application. It was only after de Gaulle left office and a 12-hour talks
session by British Prime Minister Edward Heath and French President George
Pompidou took place that Britain's third application succeeded in 1970.

“WASHINGTON--An alarming new
study released Tuesday by the Department of Education found that nearly 70
percent of Americans are incapable of pointing out a map when presented by
researchers with a map. "Not only did a majority of people just stare
blankly ahead, but nearly half pointed to nearby desk lamps in their attempts
to guess correctly," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who called
the findings endemic of the nation's failing school system. "In fact, 14
percent of all Americans claimed they had never 'even heard of no map,' and
asked if being prompted to locate one was some kind of trick question."
According to Duncan, the Department of Education has suspended all further
studies and will instead be spending the next six months just screaming into a
pillow.”

Yes,
it’s a real quote, but No, it’s not serious. It was taken from “The Onion” a
satirical publication in the US, forwarded to me by courtesy of LISMaps. And
yet, I suspect that there may be an element of truth in it as much in the UK as
in the US. Our schools initiative has clearly shown that secondary students do
not get a lot of exposure to maps through the curriculum, but that when they do
they are capable of producing some quality output in response to the task we
set them. We are always looking for helpers at these events, so if you would
like to help, check out the BCS website and get in touch, it would be great to
get more BCS members involved in our outreach activities.

Whilst I
will not be making a habit of welcoming all of our new members – hopefully it
would be too much of a task – I would like to give a special mention to our first
School. Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, is one of the first schools that we
went to with the Restless Earth Workshop. We returned again this academic year
and already have a booking to return again in 13/14. We are very pleased that
they have joined us as a Small Corporate Member and hope they will be the first
of many.

Late
breaking news – the BCS has been asked to provide a speaker on next week’s
Today programme on Radio 4. We don’t know which day yet, so keep an eye on the
website for the latest news.

The
International Cartographic Association (ICA) meets for its 26th International
Cartographic Conference in Dresden in August (see www.ICC2013.org). As part of the conference
there will be an exhibition of cartographic products from around the world. For
the UK contribution to the exhibition you are invited to you to submit examples
of any cartographic products prepared or published by you since March 2011.
Please provide two copies of each item wherever possible; one copy will be
displayed in the International Map Exhibition in Dresden. The other copy will
be exhibited at a future BCS event and will be added to the BCS collection held
in the National Library of Scotland.

For ALL entries, you must supply an image of the product (jpeg
or tiff) with a minimum resolution of 300dpi. For maps this should be the full
image; for atlases this should be the cover; for digital products it should be
a screenshot; for education products it should be appropriate, as above; for
other products it should be a picture. Details of each entry must be completed
under the appropriate category on an excel spreadsheet which is available from
the BCS website: www.cartography.org.uk . The image files and spreadsheet should be sent as an e-mail attachment to:- david.forrest@glasgow.ac.uk no
later than Monday 25th March 2013.

Two
copies of each map, atlas, globe, or other product (CD/DVD/etc.), should be
sent to me at the address below to arrive no later than Wednesday 27th
March 2013. Please enclose a printed copy of the spreadsheet with your entry. For
websites, please enter the URL at the start of the abstract. If the number of
submissions exceeds our allocated display space the UKCC will select the most
representative entries from those submitted.

By submitting an entry the product, and the use of the winning
products in analogue or digital form, is granted to ICA for further promotional
use. After the ICC2013 display of the analogue and digital winning entries
remain available to ICA for further use and archiving.

If you have any questions regarding any aspects of this invitation please contact me by e-mail or on 0141 330 5401 Meanwhile, I look forward to receiving your contributions.

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